The truth was in the signal.
The signal was everywhere.
Across the continents, television screens flickered and changed. From Führer’s face to Führer’s face. At first, most viewers couldn’t differentiate what they were seeing from the loop. It was a chair, it was a flag, it was a Führer giving a speech they could recite in their restless sleep.
Then the girl with the gun appeared. Volume knobs cranked from zero to ten. Silence to NOISE. Loud was Heinrich Himmler’s confession. Louder was Luka Löwe’s Victor’s Speech. Loudest, the shot meant to silence him.
The clip played only once. Not everyone saw it.
Not everyone saw it, but everyone heard. News of Adolf Hitler’s death—and the incredible deception surrounding it—spread faster than a wildfire in drought. It tore through air-raid shelters and Wehrmacht units, lighting up the ears of SS and partisans alike. Victor Löwe’s death followed, close as smoke, flushing out any illusions that blood kept them safe.
Momentum shifted. Everything changed.
It wasn’t just the resistance that rose up this time. Loyalist Wehrmacht no longer found themselves bound by the Führereid. Revolutionaries rose out of the population’s woodwork. General Reiniger’s army grew double, triple, tenfold as the remaining National Socialist leadership tore at one another’s throats—shredding themselves apart from the inside. The swastikas of Germania burned and burned until the skies went black and the New Order became a thing of the past.
General Reiniger’s bolstered forces made the push northwest, securing the Luftwaffe airfield and opening supply lines to the North Sea. Ammunition, fuel, heavy machinery, all the troops reborn Britain could spare… all came pouring in, carving out a new kingdom with the capital—reclaimed, renamed Neuberlin—at its core.
Out, out the indigo spread. The red bled away, away.
For months, the fighting raged. Scores more battles. Thousands more lives. Reiniger’s forces hammered the remnants of the National Socialists and the Waffen-SS south until their backs were to the Alps, and there was no more retreat. The last major battle was fought at the base of the mountains. The National Socialists were a wave dashed upon the rocks, and dashed and dashed, until, finally—surrender.
January 5, 1957. A snowy Innsbruck evening. General Erwin Reiniger met with Führer Martin Bormann, a man as ragged as his self-proclaimed title. Pen was put to paper. Bormann’s name was signed in ink.
The war was over.